Sunday, June 16, 2019

How a DIY petition succeeded RootsAction DIY 3:16 PM Via info=rootsaction.org

RootsAction DIY<info@rootsaction.org>
Via  info=rootsaction.org <info=rootsaction.org@mail.salsalabs.net>
To  alfredjohnson34@comcast.net  
GRAPHIC: Roots Action logo header
A DIY RootsAction petition was central to a campaign that just succeeded in moving the City of Charlottesville, Va., to divest public money from weapons and fossil fuel companies. You can join a free webinar on July 2nd to discuss with RootsAction Campaign Coordinator David Swanson how this was done.

You can create your own petition for change at DIY.RootsAction.org.

First, please take a few seconds to sign these important campaigns created by others:


To: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

H.Res. 109 -- the "Green New Deal" -- has 94 House co-sponsors, including 28 from California. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who represents most of San Francisco and is the leader of House Democrats, should be on that list.

Learn more and sign.

To: Members of Congress (House and Senate)

We urge you to cosponsor the Hold the LYNE Act which will prevent further research, development, production and deployment of the new, “low-yield” nuclear warhead.

Learn more and sign.

After signing the petitions, please forward this message to your friends.

Then start your own petition that we can feature in a future email.

Thanks!

-- The RootsAction.org team

P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.

P.P.S. This work is only possible with your financial support. Please donate.




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6/19 Pastors for Peace Friendshipment Caravan to Cuba in JP

Charlie Welch<cwelch@tecschange.org>
Via  Act-MA <act-ma-bounces@act-ma.org>
To  act-ma@act-ma.org  
As Pastors for Peace/IFCO says in their statement below

*This new Blockade makes IFCO's work in support of even more critical.*
Your support is needed! (AND TIMELY!)

The July 26th Coalition Of Boston is hosting

The Pastors for Peace Friendshipment Caravan

Wednesday, June 19, 2019, 7:30 pm

First Baptist Church Of Jamaica Plain

633 Center Street

Featuring:

Gail Walker,

Executive Director of IFCO/Pastors for Peace,

“The Case for Ending the US Blockade Against Cuba”

Rachel Domond, PSL Boston, on

“The recent Boston Urban Farmers delegation to Cuba”

Lee Schlenker, Witness for Peace New England,

“Recently Returned: Update on Venezuela”

Facebook Event <https://www.facebook.com/events/292633434994214/>

ifconews.org <https://ifconews.org/cuba-caravan2018/> — july26.org
<https://july26.org/> — solidaritycollective.org


*This new Blockade makes IFCO's work even more critical.*
Your support is needed! (AND TIMELY!)
Trump’s new travel restrictions:
IFCO says, Don’t Mourn, Organize!

On Tuesday 4th June the US Treasury announced new regulations governing
licensed travel to Cuba from the US. At the core of the announcement was
the news that US cruise ships could no longer go to Cuba, effective
immediately, and that the most popular category of licensed group travel
– People to People – would also be scrapped, except that travel bookings
that were already confirmed could still go ahead.

The aim of these measures is to do the maximum possible damage to the
Cuban economy. They are in line with the dominant strategy towards Cuba
that US governments have followed since 1961 – to grind down the Cuban
people, “starve” them, in the belief that eventually they will rise up
against their own government. It is a strategy that has always failed,
as Obama recognized, but the economic damage it does is real.

Many in the media have stated that Trump’s policy will badly hurt all
the Cubans who cater for US tourists by providing private accommodation,
food in private restaurants, taxi services etc. That is true but it is
not the whole truth. There are many Cubans for instance who work in the
State run tourist sector whose income from wages and tips depends on
tourism. But digging deeper – ALL Cubans stand to lose from the drop in
tourism because the foreign exchange generated by tourism is what the
Cuban government uses to purchase goods from abroad such as the food and
medicines that the country isn’t able to produce itself.

We should be outraged by what Trump is doing, but we need to turn that
outrage into action. Trump doesn’t want us to travel to Cuba, so we need
to travel to Cuba. He is putting obstacles in the way, so we have to
overcome the obstacles. Make 2019/2020 the year you go to Cuba. IFCO
will be going – come with us!

US citizens with family in Cuba remain free to go. All the 12 categories
of licensed travel to Cuba remain in place such as religious travel,
academic and student travel, “support for the Cuban people” travel. The
most general and popular sub-category of educational travel - People to
People - has gone but the whole US travel industry that sends people to
Cuba will be working to offer group packages under other licenses. We at
IFCO are already discussing how we can best continue to offer licensed
delegations to Cuba.

Despite what Trump has just done it is still easier to travel to Cuba
than it was under Clinton, Bush and the first 6 years of the Obama
administration.

But Trump’s attack highlights the validity of what IFCO has been saying
since 1992 - that Licensed Travel is not the real solution. What one
president allows, the next president can, and does, take away. US
citizens can travel to any other country in the world, the rest of the
world can travel freely to Cuba. All restrictions on travel to Cuba need
to be eliminated and that requires an Act of Congress.

Such a one paragraph bill was introduced in both houses in the 2017-18
Congress. The bipartisan bill in the Senate had 55 signatories – a
majority – but the Republican leadership would not allow a vote. Similar
bills are soon to be introduced in the current 2019-20 Congress. We
understand fully the immense difficulty in getting such a bill passed in
this Congress, and Trump of course has veto powers. But compared to the
situation in Congress when we first started our Caravans to Cuba in
1992, a lot of progress has been made by the US solidarity movement, and
we have to keep pushing towards the goal. “Stay tuned” for specific ways
you can help.

This Saturday in New York we will have the launch of our 30th,
unlicensed, Friendshipment Caravan to Cuba. We will be visiting 40 US
cities over a 10 day period. Details can be found on our website. If we
are visiting your city come to our public event to learn about what is
happening in Cuba today – the hardships and the achievements. And what
we can do to fight back against Trump.

We will be taking 37 people to Cuba on the Caravan. In the big economic
picture of US visitors it is tiny. But our Cuban partners don’t see us
as tiny, they see us as immense, because we proudly raise the banner of
complete freedom to travel to Cuba.

Will you be coming with us on next year’s caravan, or in a delegation
in 2019-20?

Let's talk!
Together
we can end the US blockade of Cuba
#SomosCuba
#NoMasBloqueo


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Can you say what you want covered during the debate? BernieSanders.com

BernieSanders.com<info@berniesanders.com>
To  n  

 -
Got a minute? Tell us your top three issues you want Bernie to talk about in the first debate. We’ll show him the list before debate prep — put in your ideas now!
What are the top issues you want Bernie to cover during the debate?
Thanks,
Team Bernie







 
Paid for by Bernie 2020
(not the billionaires)
PO BOX 391, Burlington, VT 05402
This email was sent to alfredjohnson34@comcast.net. If you need to, unsubscribe here. You can also sign up to receive fewer emails. We hope you'll stay, because emails are such an important part of how we organize and how we raise money. In fact, there is no single greater source for our campaign's fundraising than emails like this one. And that's important, because no one person, not even Bernie Sanders, can take on Trump and the billionaire class alone. 
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Imperialist Sanctions Starve Iranian Masses Down With U.S. War Moves Against Iran!

Workers Vanguard No. 1156
31 May 2019
 
Imperialist Sanctions Starve Iranian Masses
Down With U.S. War Moves Against Iran!
In an ominous escalation of U.S. threats to attack Iran, the Trump administration has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group, nuclear-armed B-52 bombers and an amphibious assault warship to the Persian Gulf region. John Bolton, the national security adviser, warns of “unrelenting force,” the Pentagon has drawn up plans to send in 120,000 troops and the White House has declared the Revolutionary Guard, part of Iran’s armed forces, to be a “terrorist organization.” Trump raged on Twitter: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran.” All this belligerence comes on top of ever-intensifying sanctions designed to cripple Iran’s economy by totally cutting off its oil exports.
Some 70,000 American troops are stationed in countries surrounding Iran, and the administration has recently announced the deployment of another 1,500. Yet the White House asserts, preposterously, that it is semicolonial Iran that is threatening the U.S. Claims of an impending Iranian attack have as much credibility as the U.S. rulers’ lies about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” the pretext for the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Democratic Party politicians and some Republicans are criticizing the war moves. But they share with the Trump administration the goal of “regime change” in Tehran, differing only over the approach. The Democrats prefer to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) brokered by the Obama White House in 2015, which compelled Iran to drastically curtail its nuclear program and submit to foreign inspectors in exchange for an easing of sanctions. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal last May.
The Republicans and Democrats alike are parties of imperialism and war, with a common class interest in maintaining U.S. supremacy in the oil-rich Near East. The purpose of Obama’s JCPOA was to ensure Iran’s disarmament in the face of unrelenting threats from the U.S. and its regional junior partners, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Tehran regime has always denied any intent to develop nuclear weapons. However, Iran needs such weapons to deter imperialist attack. The possession of nukes is no guarantee of security from a U.S. assault, but it does provide a measure of sovereignty against the marauders in Washington.
It takes chutzpah for the U.S. rulers, who possess enough nuclear firepower to destroy humanity many times over, to rail against Iran possibly getting its own nukes. The 1945 U.S. A-bombing of Japan, which incinerated some 200,000 people and served as a warning to the Soviet Union, shows what these nuclear madmen are capable of. And Washington’s Israeli allies, ruthless oppressors of the Palestinians, have a sizable nuclear arsenal of their own.
As part of what it calls “maximum pressure,” the White House has now imposed a complete embargo on sales of Iranian oil, including a threat to take action against any countries that continue to import it. Trump has canceled temporary waivers that exempted a number of countries, including China, from such provisions. Iran’s oil exports have already fallen by half in the past year. If a total embargo is enforced, it would cost Iran about $50 billion annually, 40 percent of its entire government revenue.
It is in the direct interest of the U.S. working class to demand an end to all sanctions against Iran and stand for its defense against any U.S. military attack. The same ruling class that threatens war on Iran wages savage attacks on workers and on black people, Latinos and other minorities at home. Defense of Iran against U.S. assault does not imply the least political support to the capitalist Islamic regime in Tehran, which brutally oppresses women, gays and national minorities while repressing labor struggles. But U.S. imperialism is the greatest danger to the working people and oppressed on this planet. Nothing short of the overthrow of the American capitalist ruling class through workers revolution will rid the world of this menace.
U.S. Sanctions Mean Hunger and Death
Imperialist sanctions are a modern version of siege warfare: a weapon designed to conquer through attrition. Sanctions against Hussein’s Iraq led to the deaths of some 1.5 million people while hollowing out that country in the lead-up to the U.S. occupation. It was the Democrats who took the lead in imposing the sanctions on Iran, starting under Jimmy Carter in 1979. The sanctions were expanded under Bill Clinton in the 1990s, and even more so by Obama. Among those signing on was imperialist “socialist” Bernie Sanders, who boasted in 2017, “I have voted for sanctions on Iran in the past, and I believe sanctions were an important tool for bringing Iran to the negotiating table.”
While Iran is more populous and powerful than Iraq, the sanctions, particularly those under Obama, have devastated its economy. As oil revenue plummeted, its currency was devalued by more than 450 percent. Industry was crippled by depriving Iran of replacement parts. Disease and death spread as medications became unavailable. Unemployment skyrocketed. A 2018 BBC report noted that the average consumption of food staples had decreased by 30 to 50 percent over the previous decade.
The 2015 deal, which was cosigned by Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China, eased the sanctions and gave Tehran access to $30 billion of its assets that had been seized and frozen abroad. Iran was able to increase oil exports, producing some economic growth. Trump’s scuttling of the JCPOA angered the European imperialists, who had expanded their dealings with Iran. For example, the French company Total had begun to develop a major Iranian gas field, but canceled this under U.S. pressure. Germany, France and Britain vowed to set up a special vehicle for barter-based trade with Iran that bypassed the American financial system, but it has proved stillborn.
The cruel effectiveness of sanctions is a result of the domination of world finance and trade by the U.S., the world’s chief imperialist power. Washington largely controls the international financial system through the supremacy of American banks and the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. The position of the U.S. is enforced by military might, of which it continues to have an overwhelming preponderance, particularly since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state in 1991-92.
The rifts between the U.S. and European imperialists underline the inherent fissures among these powers as they pursue their own spheres of exploitation at the expense of their rivals and the oppressed masses. But the U.S. continues to hold the whip hand. As Patrick Cockburn noted in the London Independent (10 May), the European powers “have proved to be marginal players when it comes to the Iran deal.” “In the long term,” he adds, “they also want regime change in Tehran, though they oppose Trump’s methods of obtaining it as reckless.”
Iran, China and U.S. Imperialism
For its part, China, Iran’s main foreign oil market, condemned Trump’s latest edicts during a May 17 visit by Iran’s foreign minister. China has investments in Iran worth nearly $50 billion, mainly in energy and transportation, and Beijing has advanced lines of credit to Iranian banks in euros or Chinese yuan, rather than dollars, in order to bypass sanctions. Some Chinese oil refiners have stated that they will now comply with Trump’s edicts for fear of losing access to world financial markets. But there are reports that Beijing is continuing to import Iranian oil: a tanker owned by a Chinese state company recently left the Persian Gulf carrying two million barrels of Iranian crude.
The U.S. imperialists have their sights set on the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, where capitalism was overthrown by the 1949 Revolution. In pursuit of this strategic goal, the Trump administration has combined military provocations against China with a growing trade war. Some of the bourgeois opposition to Trump’s moves against Iran is based on worries that the White House’s attention may be shifting away from China. Right-wing New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote in a 19 May op-ed titled “Don’t Fight Iran”:
“The president is now in the middle of a trade war with China that by his own logic is far more important to long-term American interests than some immediate breakthrough or regime breakdown in Tehran. So he should return to that campaign-season wisdom, and to the maxim it suggested: Whenever possible, one war at a time.”
As Marxists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialism and counterrevolution, and oppose all the tariffs and other trade-war measures imposed by Washington. At the same time, we recognize that the nationalist policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing, including its promotion of “peaceful coexistence” with the U.S. and other imperialist powers, undermine the defense of the workers state. A proletarian political revolution is needed to oust the parasitic bureaucracy, replacing it with the rule of workers and peasants councils committed to revolutionary internationalism.
U.S./Saudi/Israeli Axis of Evil
Both Sunni-fundamentalist Saudi Arabia and Zionist Israel are furious over the expanded influence of largely Shia Iran in the Near East—an unintended consequence of both U.S. imperialism’s overthrow of Iraq’s Sunni-dominated Hussein regime and, more recently, the gains made by the Iran-backed Assad regime in the Syrian civil war. Spokesmen for Tehran regularly denounce the “B-Team” that yearns to destroy Iran, including Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump adviser Bolton, who wrote a foam-flecked 2015 opinion piece for the New York Times titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
It was against this backdrop that four years ago Saudi Arabia launched its brutal war in Yemen with the aid of the U.S. and other imperialist powers. At the time, the Saudi monarchs claimed, with no evidence, that Iran was funding and arming Houthi rebels based among Yemen’s Shia minority. Since early on, U.S. forces, as well as those of Britain and France, have directly backed the Saudi war effort, with Washington also supplying fighter jets and other military hardware. To date, some 80,000 Yemenis have been killed and over three million displaced in this savage war. A third of the population faces starvation. Thanks to Saudi destruction of infrastructure, one of the largest, fastest-spreading cholera outbreaks in history has raged uncontrollably.
Houthi forces recently staged drone strikes on a Saudi oil pipeline and a military base where U.S. forces have been deployed. The Saudi regime raged that Tehran had ordered the pipeline attack and an editorial in an English-language Saudi newspaper demanded retaliatory U.S. airstrikes on Iran. Marxists stand for the military defense of the Houthi forces and their allies against the imperialist-backed Saudi assault, without giving that movement any political support. All U.S. troops and bases out of the Near East now!
For a Proletarian Perspective
Iran’s clerical regime took power in 1979 amid a social upheaval against the despised, U.S.-backed autocrat Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Powerful strikes in the oil fields and elsewhere posed the potential for workers revolution. However, the then-sizable Iranian left criminally subordinated the working class to reactionary Islamist forces whose social base was among the priestly caste of mullahs and the traditional bazaari merchant class, which had been ground down by (uneven) modernization in the country.
While reformist pseudo-socialists internationally cheered on the Islamist movement, we warned that a victory for these forces under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would be a disaster for workers and the oppressed. Uniquely, our international tendency raised the call: “Down with the Shah! Don’t bow to Khomeini! Workers to power in Iran!” The mullahs’ ascension to power led to the ferocious repression of Kurds and other minorities, the stoning of women who did not wear the oppressive veil, the mass slaughter of leftists and the execution of striking workers and others accused of “crimes against God.”
The British-based Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), whose American affiliate is Socialist Alternative, recently published an article titled “40 Years Since the Iranian Revolution: Learning the Lessons for Today’s New Working-Class Struggles” (socialistparty.org.uk, 6 February). This treatise laments that “the revolution did not end up as socialists expected” and that “many on the left were disoriented,” carefully avoiding any mention of the CWI’s own history. At the time, this outfit claimed that workers’ struggles were “forcing Khomeini in an anti-capitalist direction” and that the Islamic leader could well “complete the expropriation of capitalism” (Militant International Review, Autumn 1979)! This fantastical schema served to give a “left” cover to Islamist reaction.
The Iranian proletariat has still not recovered from the 1979 defeat. But the harrowing impact of sanctions and anger over poverty and the corruption of the ruling elite have fueled repeated working-class protest. Late last year, steel and sugar cane workers staged militant strikes against privatizations and unpaid wages.
The desperate conditions faced by Iran’s working and oppressed masses acutely pose the need for a revolutionary workers party. Such a party must be built in political opposition to all wings of the ruling class—religious or secular, hardliners or “reformists”—as well as implacable opposition to the U.S. and other imperialist powers, who will seek to manipulate the grievances of Iran’s masses to serve their own interests.
In Iran, as elsewhere in the semicolonial world, the bourgeoisie is too weak, fearful of the working class and dependent on the capitalist world market to break the chains of imperialist subjugation, overcome mass poverty and resolve other burning social issues. Thanks to its central role in production, the proletariat is the only class that can liberate the downtrodden urban and rural masses by smashing capitalist class rule through socialist revolution. There will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no liberation of women, no end to the exploitation of working people short of shattering the capitalist order in Iran and throughout the region, laying the basis for a socialist federation of the Near East.
Success in this struggle crucially hinges on the international extension of proletarian revolution to the imperialist centers, including the U.S. Capitalist-imperialist rule in America is beset by contradictions. The rulers can send killer drones to take out today’s “enemy” from thousands of miles away, but at home basic infrastructure is collapsing, public education is starved of funds and much of industry is hollowed out. The multiracial working class must be imbued with the consciousness of its potential to overthrow the American capitalist order and create a new society organized to serve human needs. The Spartacist League is dedicated to forging the vanguard party necessary for this fight.
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For God’s Sake Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, Give Us A Sign-Do Not Put Pearls Before Swine-With “Generation Of Swine,” Part 2 In Mind


For God’s Sake Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, Give Us A Sign-Do Not Put Pearls Before Swine-With “Generation Of Swine,” Part 2 In Mind




By Frank Jackman


No question politics is a hard-ball profession, tougher still when you have to write about these thieving bastards who would not know the truth if they fell over it in some forsaken gin mill some salty midnight. Are so crooked and here you can use your own variation, they need anything from their morning toilette valet to six Secret Service agents to screw them into their pants (the women too except maybe they need help with dresses). That is why whenever I have despaired, when I was ready to fold them and weep I would, still do actually as you will read below, I grab whatever Doctor Gonzo, that is the late lamented Hunter S. Thompson volume I can lay my greedy little hands on. To relieve that awful headache that reaches to my medulla every time I try to write anything about current political developments, in the United States mostly in the Age of Trump.

Now Thompson was not a taste for everybody and as he slid down the life trail he got caught in something of a trap having to accept, however reluctantly, the mantle every four years from poor Teddy White of the dreaded Making of The President series of books trap  covering the freaking presidential campaigns that in the end he knew were pure vanilla, pure bullshit even if he had some partisan favorite. In the end they all, the politicians and their hangers-on had feet of clay and corkscrew morals.

I find it very hard to draw any comparisons between today’s extreme low bar of political civility, today’s political gridlock and previous eras since these times seem to be sui generous but when I grabbed from the shelf Thompson’s Generation of Swine I knew why I grabbed the sucker (beyond that political twist a read which stopped my headaches-for a while). That book detailed mainly through weekly articles what Thompson did when he got a serious paying job for young Will Hearst whose grandfather Kane I think his last name was hired him after he had taken over his San Francisco Examiner flagship newspaper with the idea of treading new ground in the Age of Ronald Reagan, POSTUS in the 1980s. (I would be performing my own whitewash of the times, making it some kind of middle ground ‘golden age” if I did not include one Yankee cowboy, George Bush, the old man not the guy who dragged our asses into now never-ending wars in Afghanistan in those times. Pretty Boy George gave the Eastern imprimatur to every dirty trick, every ugly ploy, every bag job, every satchel filled with twenties for some ill-begotten adventure those silly bastards pulled dragging the rest of us along with them.)

The Age of Reagan, the age of the Generation of Swine, Part 1 is the perfect low-bar to compare with these days of the serious gutter that bourgeois politics has fallen into (beyond that possibility it is either hapless Warren Harding or the misbegotten Sam Grant but those boys were strictly amateur, would be eaten by a guy like now disgraced Ollie North or Steve Bannon for lunch and have time for a nap). No question at the time that likes of cowboy Ollie who ran the whole Iran-Contra out of the basement of the White House while Dutch (and Ivy League Bush slept the sleep of the dusted), Sleepy Bud MacFarlane, shifty Admiral Poindexter, bum of the month George Shultz, the Dragon Queen Nancy, some stone cold-killers running the hustle of the month club out in Evangelical land like Jimmy Bakker and Patsy Robertson (who laugh, laugh had some kind of demented presidential ambitions were in line for the first rank of hell.

I almost become bilious when I saw the names from out of the past since I thought we had buried those “undead” or at least put knives through their hearts. I know I was ready to kick the nearest television set in anger at the damn supply-side voodoo economics, the big- time red scare Cold War II and other assorted bullshit these bastards put us through. Thompson caught it just right when he said that was an age when it was unsafe to walk in the acidified rain or to touch any human blood, meaning any human being for any reason without worrying about winding up in some freaking hospice. Today is worse, far worse but you already know that.               

Yeah, those were tough times, the bar was pretty fucking low to hold the tattered social fabric together. But what would Thompson, who committed self-sought suicide over a decade ago, think about this current edition of the generation of swine. How would he go down in the mud with the bad ass boys and girls, the rabble, there is no other word for it, who run the show down in D.C. No one would blame him for barring the door to his cabin in Woody Creek and daring anybody to come within fifty yards of that locale. Still with true crazies like Trump, his family, his entourage of yes men and women, his putting the rest of us through hoops Thompson would cut to the bone, would go down in the mud and mix it up. I swear I will not ask for anything else, but Hunter give us a sign, tell us where the tarot heads, channel Johnny Depp if you have to but give us some pithy words to slay these bastard dragons. Hell, call collect if you have to I will gladly take your call anytime.         

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Saturday, June 15, 2019

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- With Ruby And The Romantics Our Day Will Come In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Where Have The Girls Gone- When Young Women’s Voices Ruled the Airwaves Before The British Rock Invasion, Circa 1964- With Ruby And The Romantics Our Day Will Come In Mind


A YouTube film clip of Ruby & The Romantics performing the classic, Our Day Will Come.

Our day will come
And we'll have everything.
We'll share the joy
Falling in love can bring.
No one can tell me
That I'm too young to know (young to know)
I love you so (love you so)
And you love me.
Our day will come
If we just wait a while.
No tears for us -
Think love and wear a smile.
Our dreams have magic
Because we'll always stay
In love this way
Our day will come.
(Our day will come; our day will come.)
[Break]
Our dreams have magic
Because we'll always stay
In love this way.
Our day will come.
Our day will come.

********
Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Not every sketch in this series was predicated on some incident which one of my growing up corner boys in the working poor Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville about thirty miles south of Boston as the crow flies. Some of the sketches that I commissioned or wrote myself under the pen name of Peter Paul Markin, a moniker used in honor of a late corner boy who taught us all a lot by who let it all slip away after his military service in Vietnam who he (we who also went) never recovered from, were taken from other places and other circumstances. The sketch below was, if I remember correctly, done after Josh Breslin, noted that one of the pathologies of the working poor, or some of the working poor, is a strong inclination to lie, lie seriously as well as just for the sake of lying. Now Josh was not an Acre corner boy although he came from working poor corner boy culture up in the old mill town of Olde Saco up in Maine so he knew from where he spoke. We had met Josh through Markin out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 when he, they, we headed out there to see what was happening. For the North Adamsville corner boys it was all about Markin pulling us out kicking and screaming if you can believe that.

But all of that Summer of Love, 1967 business has been endlessly written about here and that “overkill” was allegedly one of the reason that I was fired as site manager from this publication and not germane to Josh’s point about the chronic lying that went. He mentioned at the time that this sketch was written by him that he was thinking of the situation with Johnny Logan one of his hang around guys (corner boys really although Josh said unlike us that they never called or thought of themselves by that term). Johnny had come from an even poorer family than Josh’s which according to Josh was saying something. Josh was not sure about Johnny early childhood but he knew that Johnny was always behind the eight ball in school, in church, in sports and so he assumed that Johnny had developed the lying habits in reaction to his terrible home life from early on if he was that way in junior high school when they met and became fast friends.

They never spoke about it much, still don’t on the infrequent occasions when Josh heads back up to Olde Saco for a visit to the old town. Josh knew this much though except for his name, and maybe under some circumstances even then, Johnny would lie about almost anything. For example from very early on Josh found out that Johnny would tell people he met that he was from Kennebunkport (yes, the place where old man Bush, the first one, has his summer place) a swanky place with some cache for people who knew about the place. Would constantly lie about almost everything about himself from how well he did in sports (not well) to attending church (not much) to saying how many girlfriends he had and what he did with them (not many and not much respectively). Now all of this may seem like kids’ stuff except what happened is that Johnny would always get himself into trouble when he was called on stuff and as could be expected had very few lasting friendships since his lying spilled over to larceny and such most often than not. For example that Kennebunkport business got him in trouble when somebody went to “visit” him at the address he had given in order to collect some money he had lent Johnny. Somehow the guy traced back and found Johnny and forced him to repay the loan.

Josh had a million examples like that but the one that kind of stuck in my mind was when several years ago, maybe a decade now Johnny who had a serious drinking problem decided to sober up and join Alcoholics Anonymous. You would think that under those collective circumstances Johnny would come clean in order to start fresh. Not so. Johnny made up lies about his Army service (which is where he claimed he started drinking to excess), about his marriages (two not three), about his children (none not two), about where he lived as an adult (Massachusetts not California) and on and on. Now all of this may not be attributable to growing up poor in America since you can always use the old chestnut that others have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps but you have to at least reckon that his reaction to the hostile world outside was shaped by that experience. That is what I think anyway. Allan Jackson]         

*********** 

As I mentioned in a review of a two-volume set of, for lack of a better term, girl doo wop some of the songs which overlapped in a six volume series, I have, of late, been running back over some rock material that formed my coming of age listening music (on that ubiquitous, and very personal, iPod, oops, battery-driven transistor radio that kept those snooping parents out in the dark, clueless, and that was just fine, agreed), and that of my generation, the generation of ’68. Naturally one had to pay homage to the blues influences from the likes of Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, and Big Joe Turner. And, of course, the rockabilly influences from Elvis, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, and Jerry Lee Lewis on. Additionally, I have spent some time on the male side of the doo wop be-bop Saturday night led by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love? (good question, right). I noted there that I had not done much with the female side of the doo wop night, the great ‘girl’ groups that had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s before the British invasion, among other things, changed our tastes in popular music. I would expand that observation here to include girls’ voices generally. As there, I make some amends for that omission here.

 As I also noted in that earlier review one problem with the girl groups, and now with these generic girl vocals for a guy, me, a serious rock guy, me, was that the lyrics for many of the girl group songs, frankly, did not “speak to me.” After all how much empathy could a young ragamuffin of boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks like this writer have for a girl who breaks a guy’s heart after leading him on, yes, leading him on, just because her big bruiser of a boyfriend is coming back and she needs some excuse to brush the heartbroken lad off in the Angels' My Boyfriend’s Back. Or some lucky guy, some lucky Sunday guy, maybe, who breathlessly catches the eye of the singer in the Shirelles' I Met Him On Sunday from a guy who, dateless Saturday night, was hunched over some misbegotten book, some study book, on Sunday feeling all dejected. And how about this, some two, or maybe, three-timing gal who berated her ever-loving boyfriend because she needs a good talking to, or worst, a now socially incorrect, very incorrect and rightly so, "beating" in Joanie Sommers’ Johnny Get Angry.

 And reviewing the material in that volume gave me the same flash-back feeling I felt listening to the girl doo wop sounds. I will give similar examples of that teen boy alienation for this volume, and this approach drove the reviews of all six of these volumes in the series. I won’t even go into such novelty silly songs as the title self-explanatory My Boy Lollipop by Barbie Gaye; the teen angst hidden behind the lyrics to Bobby's Girl by Marcie Blane; or, the dreamy, wistful blandness of A Thousand Stars by Kathy Young & The Innocents that would have set any self-respecting boy’s, or girl’s, teeth on edge. And prayed, prayed out loud and to heaven that the batteries in that transcendent transistor would burn to hell before having to continue sustained listening to such, well, such… and I will leave it at that. I will rather concentrate on serious stuff like the admittedly great harmonics on Our Day Will Come by Ruby & The Romantics that I actually, secretly, liked but I had no one to relate it to, no our to worry about that day, or any day, or Tonight You Belong To Me by Patience & Prudence that I didn’t like secretly or openly but gave me that same teen angst feeling of having no one, no girl one, belonging to, me.

 And while today it might be regarded as something of a pre-feminist feminist anthem for younger women, You Don't Own Me by Lesley Gore, was meaningless for a guy who didn’t have girl to own, or not own, to fret over her independent streak, or not. Moreover, since I was never, at least I never heard otherwise, that I was some damsel in distress’ pining away boy next store The Boy Next Door by The Secrets was wrapped with seven seals. And while I had many a silent, lonely, midnight waiting by the phone night how could Cry Baby by The Bonnie Sisters, Lonely Blue Nights by Rosie & The Originals, and Lonely Nights by The Hearts give me comfort when even Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry hard-rockin’ the night away could not console me, and take away that blue heart I carried like a badge, a badge of almost monastic honor. Almost.

 So you get the idea, this stuff could not “speak to me.” Now you understand, right? Except, surprise, surprise foolish, behind the eight- ball, know-nothing youthful guy had it all wrong and should have been listening, and listening like crazy, to these lyrics because, brothers and sisters, they held the key to what was what about what was on girls’ minds back in the day, and maybe now a little too, and if I could have decoded this I would have had, well, the beginning of knowledge, girl knowledge. Damn. But that is one of the virtues, and maybe the only virtue of age. Yah, and also get this- you had better get your do-lang, do-lang, your shoop, shoop, and your best be-bop, be-bop into that good night voice out and sing along to the lyrics here. This, fellow baby-boomers, was our teen angst, teen alienation, teen love youth and now this stuff sounds great.

 And from girls even.

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Bonnie And Clyde Were Lovers Right From The Very Start They Swore They Would Be True To Each Other True As The Stars Above-Dirty Kevin Costner And Alky Woody Harrelson’s “The Highwayman”


Bonnie And Clyde Were Lovers Right From The Very Start They Swore They Would Be True To Each Other True As The Stars Above-Dirty Kevin Costner And Alky Woody Harrelson’s “The Highwayman”  


Lance Lawrence

We were kind of funny about our heroes around the old neighborhood, around the now turned to ashes Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where we eked out a growing and coming of age not with white-hatted cowboys and slinky goodie dads and moms spouting wisdom but guys and gals from the wrong side of the tracks. Outlaws, bad boys, whores (although we didn’t call them that but at first loose women and then when we got hip to what Mary Magdalene did plying her trade specializing in foot fetishes lewd women or finally whores), grifters, con artists, geeks, grafters, drifters and later when we got more literary flares, holy goofs.            

Blowhards like Roy Rogers and his honey Dale, Dale something, Ozzie Odd, some Howdy Doody junkie or Claribel hard honkers, the dumb bastard got short shrift come bad boy gathering night in front of Harry’s Variety and we wanted to steel ourselves for our midnight creep work around the richer precincts of the town. And who could blame us since between older brothers and uncles doing a nickel or a dime for anything from whacko armed robberies to cons up the ying-yang to neighborhood legend Saint Trigger Burke a key guy in the big Brinks armored car robbery that inflamed at least two generation of Acre bad asses who else could make the nighttime hall of fame (later hall of shame but that was much later when some of us sobered up enough to know that doing nickels and dimes from drugstore bullshit only got you old fast or to be somebody’s “girlfriend”)         
That was the local picture but then the late Pete Markin still missed who died with his boots on catching that Westbound train as they say in the hobo jungle camps from when he dived down Sonora way added to the shrine holy, holy relics when he got caught up in the folk music scene for a minute before he went under. Enflamed our hearts with the story in song by Woody Guthrie about a certified Okie gangster, bandito hombre who shot his way into more federally uninsured banks around the Dust Bowl than one could imagine. A guy named Pretty Boy Floyd, out of those hills who before he cashed his check, before he took the fall blazed a legend for himself in those godforsaken Great Depression 1930s. A guy who they say left dough for starving up against it farmers once he took a turn to the wild side, once he saw dying in the dust was nowhere, man, nowhere. A regular Robin Hood before we found out that the old-timey Robin Hood, real name Robert Lockwood was a rack-renter and serf beater who gave to the poor and left the rich a bit short of the kale. We would endlessly play that song to Pretty Boy adding verses about how he was a little sappy to share his gild but okay otherwise especially when taking out a few coppers in his dust. John Dillinger had that same kind of cache and forever more we would hate the name Hoover and the FBI for doing Johnny wrong.   

Bringing up names like Pretty Boy and Dillinger though immediate bring to bring to mind the legendary outlaw bad boy kick ass of our own generation, Pretty James Preston. A lot of people may say who, who was this guy but for a few years around the areas south of Boston he was the holy of holies. See Pretty James (nobody ever called him anything but that or faced some scowl that might end badly depending on Pretty James’ mood) robbed banks in the days when they made a certain sense before the techno-madness made white collar bank theft more lucrative and less dangerous. Not just robbed banks but did it in daylight shotgun or some heavy artillery in hand. By himself. (The actual robbery part although he had red-headed Irish beauty to cry for Molly Malone as look-out before the fall and we never heard from her again, at least I never did and she had lived the next street over from me on those wrong side of the tracks.) On a Vincent Black Lightening, a very fast, outrun the cops very fast British motorbike. Pretty James would fall down not for his audacity, his balls, his chutzpah but because some fucking rent-a-cop though the money Pretty James was grabbing from the bank was his personal stash or something. Pretty James had to waste the bastard but not before being winged to slow him down enough for the dirty coppers to lay that brother low. In certain lonely Friday night circles where young guys from hunger hang they still whisper of his exploits like some stylish cultists.           

All of this built-up to lead into the film under review The Highwaymen about the two dead-beat ex-Texas Rangers who led the huge expedition who laid a couple of other, let’s call them folk heroes, also from the 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde low. A tear wells up in my eye when I say their names, when I think what rotten stuff was done to them and yet their names shine to this day when anybody speaks of stone-cold killers and desperadoes who went off the tracks a bit. The worse thing about this film is that the two stars, Bonnie and Clyde, get nothing but a two-bit cameo appearance at the end when they are summarily executed in a hail of gunfire under the direction of these two has-been low rent Rangers who previously had been laid out to pasture.  Billy, who cares what their names are, played by Kevin Costner who must have been hard up for cash, for revenue flow, and Virgil, again who cares names, played by Woody Harrelson who used to serve them off the arm at  Cheers barroom on Beacon Street in Boston and who hasn’t been seen in films since he played some very real American psycho a while back get a reprieve from the harried Texas governor to grab Bonnie and Clyde before they rob every bank and shoot every cop in Texas.   

Billy and Virgil and little, no, a lot long in the tooth, hem and hew before getting down to average day police detection work. Hindering them is the whole state and federal law enforcement apparatus who were already unsuccessfully pursing the banditos. Further hindering the coppers was a pretty significant network of people, average Okies and Arkies who were thrilled by Bonnie and Clyde’s exploits   especially when they ran the coppers raggedy. This couple, as anybody knows, as even we knew back in that Harry’s Variety Store night, knew it in our bones were doomed, were built to take the fall. Get this though, Billy and Virgil or whatever their names were nobody remembers but the names Bonnie and Clyde, well, they might live in infamy, but everybody knows who they are, what they mean to the folk hero-deprived dusty people of the 1930s.          

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